The present invention relates to the field of user interfaces in general and more particularly to navigation interfaces for navigating large data structures interactively. As described in Scheinkman (U.S. Pat. No. 5,848,424 assigned to the assignee of the present application and incorporated herein by reference for all purposes), a browser can display hypertext pages and indicate draggable elements on the hypertext page being viewed. A browser can also display target components and allow its user to drag page elements onto target components. The browser and/or server (to which the browser is connected) then perform an action, which is a function of both the dragged element and the drop target. Usually this action involves getting data from a database, processing that data and displaying the result. The details of the actionxe2x80x94what data to get, what processing to doxe2x80x94are determined by the user""s choice of dragged element and drop target.
In one embodiment of a hyper-relational navigation system according to the present invention, a correlation server is used to provide a relationship between a component in one data structure and a component in another data structure. In one method, a draggable element and a drop target are identified. Metadata is imported into a class-relation matrix maintained for the first data structure and a response to a navigation action is formulated, wherein the response is dependent upon at least the draggable element, the drop target and a cell in the class-relation matrix that corresponds to the draggable element and the drop target and includes imported metadata.